Odd Marketing

The marketing team Oddbins have made a couple of decisions recently that, from my perspective at least, appear counter-productive.

Firstly, they have decided to only offer discounts when you buy six bottles or more. As an occasional Oddbins shopper in central London, I am rarely in a position to carry half a dozen bottles home, and anyway tend to use their stores (in preference to say Waitrose, Majestic or a long-tailed online stockist, which are all at least equally well-stocked and convenient) to try out 'odd' bottles of wine that take my fancy or are needed for a social emergency. (I wonder how many of their urban customers can easily park outside...or are strong enough to manage a half-case?)

Worse still they have simultaneously come up with their first budget-priced own label bottles of white and red. "So good...we decided to put our name on the bottle." Except that the red is so bad I am unlikely ever to trust the brand ever again. Instead of one of the few undrinkable wines from the Languedoc, why couldn't they have chosen a blend that would associate a bit of delight (as well as value) with their name?

I was going to have a rant as well about Screenselect's online transition to Lovefilm.com, but aside from the fact that their bright new website is still a bit clunky, my initial suspicion on arrival on the home page that they might be turning private content into social content by stealth was entirely unfounded. In fact, I dare say that I would actually be prepared to voluntarily devote some of my time to contributing to a more social movie recommendations space, so it now strikes me that the new DVD rental entity could be missing a trick here. Meanwhile my decision to reward Netflix for their decision to run a $1m recommendation-algorithm competition by buying more of their stock seems to be (mutually) paying off.